Home > End the charade
Wars and conflicts International USA
The cognitive dissonance required to believe the Bush administration is approaching critical mass. Some semblance of victory in the War on Method has been declared at least four times that I recall, and yet American troops are still being murdered on a weekly basis in free and democratic Iraq.
The armed forces are now reduced to lying about who killed its poster boys, putting its own troops on trial and revising its recruitment targets to disguise the fact that no amount of media triumphalism suffices to convince most young Americans that extending the Pax Americana to the Middle East is worth death by improvised explosive device.
Bear in mind that I am not an opponent of the American military - I know too many good men serving in its various branches to view it in a negative light. To hold our men and women in uniform responsible for the manifest failures of their commander in chief and his administration would be tantamount to blaming the car for crashing when its intoxicated driver failed to see a red light and ended up driving through a store window.
And it is easy to demonstrate that one can criticize the Iraqi Occupation without criticizing America’s armed forces. The Marines are not particularly keen on the 20,000 mercenaries - they prefer to be called "military contractors" - who represent almost 18 percent of the USA’s military strength now in Iraq.
It will take years, perhaps a decade or more, before it is possible to determine ultimate success or failure in Iraq. But by some measures, the dual invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have certainly served their purpose. The Taliban and Saddam Hussein have been driven from power and they have been replaced by elected governments that are no less legitimate than our own Washington plutocracy. What, then, prevents the president from declaring victory and bringing our soldiers home? Why was it necessary for 266 Americans to die after the Jan. 31 election of a free Iraqi government?
And finally, if free elections are not enough to assert victory, what is the definition of success? Does one even exist? The metrics, nebulous as they are, appear to keep changing.
The danger is that the conspiracy theorists were right and that this was nothing but a steppingstone to a Middle East empire from the start. Michael Ledeen, the brilliant neoconservative, has been pleading for an expansion of the war to include Iran from the very start - the drums beginning to beat slowly in the media deep would appear to suggest that he’s finally going to get his wish. "Faster, please"? I don’t think so.
One of the great mysteries of World War II was how Germany did not go on an industrial war footing until long after the die had been cast. Ironically, although the War on Method has now lasted longer than the War in Europe, the United States has not only refused to go on a war footing, but disdains to even bother declaring war, while maintaining almost completely open borders, the better to serve enemy combatants.
Let’s face it: If carrying a bloody chainsaw is not enough to deny a foreigner entrance to the United States, there is no border control. Indeed, the president has made it clear he’s more concerned about preventing private citizens from doing the job that his administration is neglecting than he is about enemy aliens armed with suitcase nukes entering the country.
As long as immigration remains open, the administration’s position is obviously nonsensical. The push for Patriot II combined with the president’s antipathy for the Minuteman movement clearly demonstrates that he is more concerned about ending the potential threat to Washington from American civil liberties than he is with the danger to America from alien terrorists.
It is time to end this charade. The troops have won the war, history proves they cannot impose a nonexistent peace. Bring them home.
Vox Day is a novelist and Christian libertarian. He is a member of the SFWA, Mensa and the Southern Baptist church, and has been down with Madden since 1992. Visit his Web log, Vox Popoli, for daily commentary and responses to reader email.